Saving Seafood

Funding for Alaska’s commercial fisheries division in good shape, with $300K going to chinook project

April 30, 2018 — A shuffle in some funding leaves Alaska’s commercial fisheries division in good shape to manage the resources and target important projects across the state.

At first glance, the $69 million operating budget for FY19 appears to be down slightly from last year’s $72.3 million, but that’s not the case.

“Most of that difference is a sort of ‘cleanup’ in authority we no longer had funding for, such as the Alaska Sustainable Salmon Fund, test fishing and some interagency items. The rest is due to (a) $1.1 million shortfall in Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission revenue, which was made up from other department funds,” said Scott Kelley, commercial fisheries division director.

Added to the budget was a nearly $1 million unrestricted increment offered by Rep. Dan Ortiz of Ketchikan, which got the nod from Alaska lawmakers.

The extra money will be distributed among 11 projects in four regions: Southeast, Central, Westward and the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim, or AYK.

 The biggest project focuses on research to help determine the causes of declining chinook salmon.

“It’s a $300,000 project for a juvenile chinook marine survey in the Bering Sea,” Kelley said. “Almost the first thing I get asked at meetings around the state is what’s going on with king salmon. That project looks at the early marine survival, which is where we think these mortality events are most affecting the species. It’s the only project in the state that really gives us a first look at what’s going on there.”

Other projects back on the funding track include Southeast and Togiak herring research, westward salmon weirs, Southeast sablefish research and Prince William Sound Tanner crab.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Alaska: Halibut faces headwinds as catches drop 10%

March 29, 2018 — Pacific halibut catches for 2018 won’t decline as severely as initially feared, but the fishery faces headwinds from several directions.

Federal fishery managers announced just a few days before the March 24 start of the halibut opener that commercial catches for Alaska will be down 10 percent for a total of 17.5 million pounds.

The industry was on tenterhooks awaiting the catch information, which typically is announced by the International Pacific Halibut Commission in late January. However, representatives from the U.S. and Canada could not agree on how to apportion the halibut catches in fishing regions that stretch from the west coast and British Columbia to the Bering Sea.

“The Canadians felt there was justification in the survey and commercial fishery data that, in concert with a long-held position that the IPHC’s apportionment scheme was not accurate, supported a higher catch limit. They were also opposed to the slow pace the U.S. has taken in reducing its bycatch of halibut in the Bering Sea,” said Peggy Parker of Seafoodnews.com.

The impasse put the decision in the laps of federal managers at NOAA Fisheries in Washington, D.C., who were pushed to the wire to get the halibut catch limits and regulations on the rule books in time for the fishery start.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

 

Alaska: Decline in Pacific halibut fishery not as severe as feared

March 26, 2018 — Pacific halibut catches for 2018 won’t decline as severely as initially feared, but the fishery faces headwinds from several directions.

Federal fishery managers announced just a few days before the March 24 start of the halibut opener that commercial catches for Alaska will be down 10 percent for a total of 17.5 million pounds.

The industry was on tenterhooks awaiting the catch information, which typically is announced by the International Pacific Halibut Commission in late January. However, representatives from the U.S. and Canada could not agree on how to apportion the halibut catches in fishing regions that stretch from the West Coast and British Columbia to the Bering Sea.

“The Canadians felt there was justification in the survey and commercial fishery data that, in concert with a long-held position that the IPHC’s apportionment scheme was not accurate, supported a higher catch limit. They were also opposed to the slow pace the U.S. has taken in reducing its bycatch of halibut in the Bering Sea,” said Peggy Parker of Seafoodnews.com.

The impasse put the decision in the laps of federal managers at NOAA Fisheries in Washington, D.C., who were pushed to the wire to get the halibut catch limits and regulations on the rule books in time for the fishery start.

Adding to the halibut drama are reports of hefty holdovers of fish in freezers, and competition again from Atlantic halibut from eastern Canada.

Prices for Alaska halibut are typically very high for the season’s first deliveries and then decrease after a few weeks. Last year they started out topping $7 per pound to fishermen at major ports. Prices remained in the $5-$6 range for the duration of the eight-month fishery, prompting a push-back from buyers who complained of “price fatigue” and switched their sourcing to less-expensive Atlantic fish.

How that scenario plays out this year remains to be seen, but the combination of fish inventories and availability from elsewhere will likely provide a downward push on Alaska halibut prices.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Marketing campaign aims to convince consumers that ‘ugly’ crabs can be just as tasty

March 20, 2018 — “It’s what’s on the inside that counts” is the message Alaska crab marketers are pushing to encouraging their customers to put appearances aside.

“We’re telling them to ‘get ugly,'” said Tyson Fick, executive director of the trade group, Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, speaking of the new campaign launched partnership with the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute last week at the big Seafood Expo in Boston.

The promotion showcases Alaska crabs with darker, discolored shells, or those that are scarred or adorned with barnacles that may be less visually appealing to shoppers.

“It’s the initial step in a campaign to raise awareness among retailers, restaurants and consumers,” said Jeremy Woodrow, ASMI communications director. “We’re saying ‘go ahead, tell your customers to get ugly. After all, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.”

“Ugly crab is safe and delicious to eat, it just isn’t as pretty,” says a flyer distributed at Boston, explaining that shell appearance varies based on crab maturity and timing of the molt. It says that shell variations demonstrate “the authentic nature of seafood caught in the wild,” and that “purchasing ugly crab is a way to support our planet’s wild resources.”

The Get Ugly team is modeling Alaska crab after similar image enhancement efforts underway by farmers.

“We’re taking a page out of the book of what some fruits and vegetable have done — that a blemish doesn’t affect the taste of the thing, and with crab, the meat fill might even be better,” Fick said, adding that avoiding food waste and improving sustainability are also part of the message.

Creating more customers for less-attractive crab also would improve fishermen’s bottom lines, as the less-pretty product drags down prices.

“It is graded at the processor and may be graded further at the repacker. There may be several grades for off-color shells depending on the species, quantity and other factors. It varies from year to year,” said Jake Jacobsen, director of the Inter-Cooperative Exchange which negotiates prices for most Bering Sea crabbers.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Alaska: Halibut fishery poised to open as NMFS works on 2018 catch limits

March 15, 2018 — Alaska’s halibut fishery is set to open this month, but the final quota was still not completely set as of March 14, even as fishermen began to receive permits in the mail.

Indications, however, are that the quota will decrease this year compared to last.

Under regulations published by the National Marine Fisheries Service this month, the fishery will open March 24 and run through Nov. 7. But the total catch limits remain unknown.

That’s because this year, for just the second time in the commission’s history that dates to its creation by a 1923 treaty, the International Pacific Halibut Commission could not come to an agreement about the 2018 catch limits at its annual meeting. That leaves it up to regulatory bodies in each country to determine the limits instead.

Halibut Coalition Executive Director Tom Gemmell said he expects the quota to decrease by about 15 percent overall compared to 2017, when Alaskan fishermen had their total statewide quota set at about 22.62 million pounds. In 2017, and for a few years prior, the quota had increased slightly after nearly a decade of annual cuts totaling more than 70 percent from mid-2000 highs.

The halibut commission is the six-member body (three each from the U.S. and Canada) charged with regulating the halibut fishery from Northern California to the Bering Sea under the international Pacific halibut treaty, including setting the catch limit each year. The IPHC meets each January and decides on the coastwide halibut catch limits, based on input from staff scientists. But this past January, at its annual meeting in Portland, the commission was not able to come to an agreement on the 2018 limits.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

 

Alaska: In Nome, state experts ponder responses to Bering Sea crises

February 21, 2018 — Experts from around the state gathered in Nome to discuss marine mammals and how multiple entities can respond to different types of emergencies that may happen in the Bering Sea.

Mandy Migura with the National Marine Fisheries Service was one of the presenters at a “Strait Science” talk hosted at University of Alaska Fairbanks Northwest Campus.

Migura discussed how marine mammal stranding events take place in Alaska sporadically but have been rising in numbers since tracking began in the 1980s.

“Strandings involve live marine mammals. these may be animals that are unable to return to their natural habitat without some kind of assistance. And they may be injured, they may be entangled in gear or marine debris, they may be entrapped — ice entrapment, ice may form up and they’re in an area where they can’t get back to where they should be — or they may be disoriented, may be a health issue or something in the environment that’s affecting them.”

Migura is Alaska’s marine mammal stranding coordinator and said dead marine mammals can also be categorized as stranded.

With more cases of marine mammal strandings being reported, the Bering Sea marine ecosystem is currently in a volatile state.

Nome-based marine advisory agent Gay Sheffield mentioned how sharks have been found more frequently in the Bering Straits region, with the latest one documented in Gambell in summer 2017.

On the other side of St. Lawrence Island, a stellar sea lion was harvested last year in Savoonga, which she said is uncommon.

Migura said local and regional partners reporting this kind of information greatly benefits the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Read the full story at KTOO

 

Alaska: Bering Sea Trawl Cod Fishery May Have Been Shortest Ever, as High Prices Attract Effort

February 20, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The Bering Sea federal trawl cod fishery closed in what may be record time on Feb. 11, just 22 days after the Jan. 20 opener, according to National Marine Fisheries Service Biologist Krista Milani in Unalaska/Dutch Harbor.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the shortest ever,” and certainly for as long as she’s had the job going back to 2009.

While the Bering Sea cod quota is down 20 percent from last year, Milani said other factors are at play. She pointed out that in a previous year, with an almost identical quota, the season remained open for about six weeks, ending the second week of March in 2010.

This year, the A season Bering Sea cod trawl quota is 24,768 metric tons, and in 2010 it was 24,640 mt.

“The bigger thing is the price is good, and there’s a lot of interest in it,” Milani said.

“I think there’s a lot of reasons,” including fishermen feeling a need to build catch histories to qualify for future Pacific cod fishing rights, if a rationalization program is adopted for cod in the Bering Sea, she said.

“I think there’s some fear it could go to limited access,” Milani said.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Program is now considering a plan to restrict the number of boats eligible to fish for cod in the Bering Sea.

The fish council floated ideas to limit catcher vessel participation in the Bering Sea cod fishery, including controversial catch shares or individual fishing quotas, during a December meeting in Anchorage.

IFQs are not among alternatives the council is considering. The purpose and need statement, approved unanimously, includes limiting trawling to vessels actually fishing cod in various years between 2010 and 2017.

This would create a limited entry program within a limited entry program. Bering Sea cod fishing is already limited to boats with licenses. Some of those boats don’t usually participate, but can when prices are high or stocks are low in their usual fisheries.

Brent Paine, the executive director of United Catcher Boats, said something needs to be done to regulate fishing in the congested “Cod Alley.” He accurately predicted a three-week season in 2018 in the area offshore of Unimak Island.

“This is the last unrationalized fishery in the eastern Bering Sea,” Paine said. “If you don’t do anything, we’re all going to be losers.”

While Paine said the NPFMC’s present majority is unsympathetic to rationalization, calling it the “R word,” he said that may change in the future.

Rationalization opponents see IFQs as privatization adding another barrier to entry into the fishing world, while supporters call it a reward for investment with benefits including substantial retirement income.

Milani said Tuesday it was still too early to say how many trawlers participated, as there were vessels still delivering cod to processing companies, and perhaps some trawlers delivering loaded nets to offshore motherships. The last count had 55 in the federal cod fishery, compared to 57 last year, she said, expecting this year’s final count will be higher.

The number of boats is hard to track in-season, as many go back and forth between cod, pollock and other fisheries, although there are some that only fish cod, Milani said.

The depressed cod stocks in the Gulf of Alaska probably also contributed to this year’s fast pace, she said. Gulf cod stocks are way down, far worse than the smaller decline in the Bering Sea, an 80 per percent decline from last year.

Earlier in the season, Milani said the number of Gulf boats coming into the federal Bering Sea cod fishery was smaller than expected.

The Gulf cod crash appears to be having a greater impact in the state cod fishery, with 32 small boats registered on Tuesday, up from 24 last year in the Dutch Harbor Subdistrict. The state waters fishery is limited to boats 58 feet or shorter fishing within three miles of shore and using only pot gear.

The Dutch Harbor Subdistrict total catch on Monday was 11.4 million pounds caught in pots from a total quota of 28.4 million pounds. The pot cod fishery is expected to continue for another 14 to 16 days, according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game Biologist Asia Beder in Unalaska.

In the Aleutian Islands Subdistrict state waters fishery, with a quota of 12.8 million pounds, Beder couldn’t release precise total catch numbers because of confidentiality rules when there’s fewer than three processors. She said the fleet has caught somewhere between 25 and 50 percent. There’s only one processor, in Adak, Golden Harvest — formerly Premier Harvest, she said. And she could also say there were eight small boats fishing cod in the Aleutian subdistrict, all in the Adak section.

In the Aleutians, cod boats are allowed up to 60 feet in with various gear types, although longliners are limited to 58 feet.

In Bering Sea crab fisheries, the 50 boats dropping pots for opilio snow crab had made 134 landings for 10.9 million pounds or 58 percent of the total quota. The cumulative catch per unit of effort for the season is an average of 161 crab per pot, according to shellfish biologist Ethan Nichols of ADF&G in Unalaska.

In the Western Bering Sea Tanner fishery, 28 vessels had made 66 landings for 2.1 million pounds, with the quota nearly wrapped up at 85 percent.

In the Eastern Aleutian District, two small boats harvesting bairdi Tanner had landed over 75 percent of the total quota of 35,000 pounds, Nichols said.

The EAD is open this year only in the Makushin and Skan Bay area, and that’s where the Tanners are from that sell for $10 each by local fisherman Roger Rowland at the Carl E. Moses Boat Harbor in Unalaska.

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

 

Alaska cod quotas light up a loophole

February 16, 2018 — The fallout of shifts in Alaska cod quotas has sparked another scramble among the region’s cod fishermen. Overall P-cod quota is down, but the Aleutian Islands saw a small uptick, which led more boats to target the area in the A-season this year. The allocations, however, have had some unintended consequences.

For some background, in the wild and harsh fishing environments of the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands and Gulf of Alaska, a 60-footer qualifies as a small boat. A fleet of these smaller pot-cod boats typically fishes inshore waters and relies on deliveries to the remote Bering Sea island of Adak to run their Aleutian operations.

The remoteness of the region, however, has historically made running a processing plant there logistically implausible without guarantees of landings. This led the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to set aside 5,000 tons of cod quota that must be processed in the remote Aleutian Island community of Adak rather than off-loaded to offshore factory processors, as the larger catcher vessels — sometimes referred to as the Amendment 80 fleet after the legislation that put them into operations — do in the offshore fishery.

“This harvest set-aside provides the opportunity for vessels, [Aleutian Islands] shoreplants, and the communities where AI shoreplants are [located]to receive benefits from a portion of the AI Pacific cod fishery,” according to the council.

Read the full story at National Fishermen

 

To get good credit, Alaska’s fishing towns may have to factor in climate change

February 15, 2018 — Late last year one of the world’s largest credit rating agencies announced that climate change would have an economic impact on the U.S.

Moody’s suggested that climate risks could become credit risks for some U.S. states.

Even though Alaska is warming nearly twice as fast as the rest of the U.S., its credit rating doesn’t seem to be in danger. But take a closer look at some of the state’s coastal communities and the story changes, especially when Alaska’s fishing towns consider adding climate risks to their balance sheets.

Frank Kelty is the mayor of the Unalaska, a tiny town is on an island sandwiched between the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, near some of the richest fishing grounds in the world.

Kelty has been there for 45 years, and lately, he’s seen a lot of changes.

“We’ve had a huge increase in humpback whales coming right into the inner harbor by the road system. Just hundreds of them hanging around,” he said.

People have been pulling off of the road to watch what he calls the “whale show.”

Read the full story at KTOO

 

Bering Sea Crab Fisheries Receive Certifications Recognizing Their Sustainability

February 7, 2018 — Five Alaska crab fisheries, including two Bering Sea ones, have met the Alaska Responsible Fisheries Management (RFM) Standard.

According to the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI), the Eastern Bering Sea tanner crab is newly certified under the Alaska RFM for this year. Aleutian Islands’ golden king crab also received a new certification.

In terms of re-certified crab fisheries, Bristol Bay red king crab, St. Matthew Island blue king crab, and the Eastern Bering Sea snow crab all completed the assessment process successfully.

ASMI’s RFM model is based on the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations code and guidelines for credible certification, which assures buyers that the crab is sourced from responsibly managed, sustainable fisheries.

Read the full story at KNOM